I am aware of Minsky's work, see my other reply. I was too flippant in my comment. Perhaps I should have said intelligent behavior, rather than intelligent structures, is self-organized.

But, I don't think any approach to consciousness can be considered a large arm of cognitive science. Most cognitive scientists don't want to touch consciousness with a ten-foot pole. But of course you're right that connectionism lives on.

Let me try to explain the kind of self-organization I have in mind. Consider the fundamental question "how is behavior organized"? The behaviorists pointed to organization in the environment. Cognitivists point to organization of internal representations. Connectionists and similar approaches point to organization of neural structures. Yes, something intelligent emerges from simple, perhaps self-organized, components in this scheme. But they are unwilling to take self-organization to the level of behavior.

In my opinion, a true self-organizational approach to behavior is to say that behavior emerges from the interaction between organism and environment. This is the level at which we need to accept self-organization. It is far from the mainstream. The mainstream approach to vision, for example, starts with the retinal image and asks what can be inferred from it. Yes, maybe they say that this inference engine is itself a self-organized structure. But it still reifies an input-process-output view of cognition. The sensory system receives input, constructs a model of the world. The "higher cognitive" centers formulate plans from this model. The action system instantiates these plans.

To bring it back to the ants: The ants demonstrate what can be done without explicit planning. Modern cognitive science studies explicit planning, even if they agree that this capability emerges from simple components.

As I said in the other post, I could provide literature if you are interested in any of these specific debates.